One of Canada’s most successful venture capital (VC) firms is expanding its investment team by promoting two of its principals to partner roles as it prepares for a fundraising push in 2026.
Montréal’s Inovia Capital announced today it will promote Kory Jeffrey and Taha Mubashir. At the same time, it said it intends to raise a sixth venture fund, targeting companies between seed and Series B, and a second Discovery fund, meant to invest in other VC funds and directly in companies at the earliest stages.
“We’re seeing a paradigm shift where, competitively, the chess board is being shook.”
Taha Mubashir,
Inovia Capital
Founded in 2007, Inovia Capital has more than $2.5 billion USD ($3.5 billion CAD) in assets under management and investments in Canadian unicorn companies like Cohere, Wealthsimple, and Hopper.
In a statement, Inovia partner Karamdeep Nijjar said both investors earned their spots through “deal execution, thesis development, and trust with founders.”
A principal since February 2022, Mubashir will now be a partner on the Venture Investment team. His new role will have him continue to back companies in cybersecurity, infrastructure, and FinTech—a “Venn diagram” where he brings unique expertise, he told BetaKit in an interview on Wednesday.
Mubashir said the strategy and fund size for Fund VI will be “very similar” to its Fund V. So will its software focus, particularly on AI companies.
“AI will continue to be a trend that runs into Fund VI,” Mubashir said. “We’re seeing a paradigm shift where, competitively, the chess board is being shook.”
Mubashir came from nearly a decade at PSP Investments, where he mainly worked with growth and later-stage companies. He said his interest in VC was sparked by some growth-stage experimental bets PSP made on software giants Snowflake and Palantir. At Inovia, he has helped invest in portfolio companies such as Montréal-based Flare and sustainability reporting platform Novisto.
Principal and vice-president of technology Jeffrey will now be a partner on Inovia’s venture team, which invests from seed to Series B. Jeffrey is part of a Google-to-Inovia pipeline, joining former Google CFO Patrick Pichette (now a partner in London) and former Google Canada engineering lead Steve Woods (now Inovia’s CTO and partner).
In an interview, Jeffrey told BetaKit that his first-ever Inovia cheque was actually in Canadian AI darling Cohere for its Series C. Having overlapped with Cohere’s co-founders at Google, he played a unique role in the company’s genesis: he put together the list of promising students for AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton to choose from when selecting Nick Frosst as a Google Brain employee.
Jeffrey and Woods also crafted Inovia’s thesis in artificial intelligence (AI) investing, and the firm has continued to back AI infrastructure plays, like Montréal’s Botpress, and new AI applications like legaltech startup Spellbook.
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Beyond adding his AI focus to the venture team, Jeffrey will be a partner on the Discovery team. Inovia launched the Discovery Fund I in 2023 to invest in emerging North American VC fund managers focused on pre-seed and seed-stage startups. At the time, Nijjar told BetaKit that the firm felt it could support the earliest stage investments by backing the VCs better suited to do those deals.
So far, Inovia says the program has backed 31 funds across North America and Europe, including Garage Capital, Luge Capital, and Telegraph VC, which have contributed to 52 exits and 37 unicorn companies.
Inovia is going out to fundraise from limited partners (LPs) as first-time managers are struggling to capitalize. In 2023, the firm was looking to fill a market gap for emerging managers as economic conditions worsened and investors shied away from bets on first-time fund managers. Two years later, the VC fundraising landscape has arguably become frostier: according to the Business Development Bank of Canada, the share of emerging managers has shrunk to its lowest proportion in a decade, and only 17 funds raised a total of $2 billion in 2024, which was a year-over-year decline in dollars raised and average fund size.
The new Discovery Fund, according to Jeffrey, will have a larger target size as it looks to expand the program. Its investment split of roughly 80 percent into funds and 20 percent direct into companies will be the same, as Inovia seeks to “double down on great emerging managers” in Canada and beyond.
The Canadian VC fundraising landscape is in a difficult spot, he acknowledged, as investors haven’t seen enough returns to invest in a second fund. The boom of 2021 led to a spate of overheated valuations and a frenzy of fundraising, a lot of which has now contracted.
“If your starting point was at the height of 2021, that’s tough,” Jeffrey said.
With its extensive track record, Inovia is hoping to anchor and de-risk some of these early-stage deals for other investors. “We enjoy playing that role to put an institutional stamp on an emerging manager to help unlock that follow-on capital.”
Feature image by Madison McLauchlan for BetaKit. Photos courtesy Inovia Capital.